Become Your Fursona

This magic item was created by Weasel clerics inspired by the abilities of spiders to get into places they’re not supposed to. While they’re still working on a way to shrink down, they were able to intuit a way to allow a Weasel to walk up walls in the same way a spider would.

The name is somewhat misleading, as they usually take the form of a set of cloth wraps (though fingerless gloves may be used depending on the maker.) The material is irrelevant, for the gloves’ true power lies in the Weasel pictograms painted on it.

“This can’t be real.”

Blades of grass under my pawpads, which I was sure I didn’t have before. Tree branches scraping through my fur. The painful burning of overexertion in my chest.

“It’s just a dream.”

The bitter cold night air. The heavy panting of the beast behind me, a brief glimpse over my shoulder revealing little more than it was much bigger than me and probably much stronger. All of my instincts screaming at me to run for my life.

“It’s just a–”

The creature’s very real jaws snapping at my heels, causing very real scrapes. A fresh burst of adrenaline coursed through me, and I was able to surge forward again, just out of reach of the thing.

“…A very realistic dream.”

I squinted into the distance. There was something weird with my eyesight, all I could see was black and white. It did have its advantages– I was able to see in contrasts well. No wonder I could see in the dark this well. The disadvantage was I could very clearly see I was about to run off a cliff.

“Oh God. Ohgodohgodohgod…”

It extended as far as I could see. Looking back, I was probably on a mesa or something, but my geographical location was the least of my concerns then.

“It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream.”

My own thoughts set a cadence for my run. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore how incredibly vivid everything was, and hoped it would all be over soon. And finally my paws hit thin air.

I didn’t fall. I was soaring above the ground, clumsily flapping the wings I didn’t know I had before. I laughed in spite of myself, a strangely human sound given I didn’t feel human at all. Despite the muscle strain and stress, I was half-crazed with relief and beyond feeling pain.

Or at least I was until I heard the beating of wings not my own. I didn’t even have time to look behind me before a great, clawed, heavy something slamming into me, sending me spiraling to the ground as its jaws bit into my neck, making it impossible to breathe. With oxygen deprivation creeping in and strangling rational thought, I had about enough time to note that the ground was rushing up much too fast for asphyxiation to be a concern.

I was wrong. Just when I was inches from the ground, I flinched. And when I opened my eyes again, I was on the kitchen floor, tangled in my bedsheets, and not breathing.

I’d almost drowned once– hit my head on the edge of a pool when I was diving in. That was almost peaceful, because I didn’t even realize I was dying until they dragged me out of the water, with everyone but me screaming and panicking. I was numb and far away and (in retrospect) way too comfortable with it all.

And this was nothing like that. It felt like there was something crushing my chest, even though there was nothing there, my muscles ached like I’d ran for miles, something was grabbing my throat, and my lungs were burning in agony.

Somewhere inbetween me frantically thrashing around, a tiny bit of air forced its way through my windpipe, and the pain subsided just a bit. Then a little more, and a little more, and finally I was breathing normally again.

Even after all that, I still couldn’t move. I knew I probably looked ridiculous, but my parents knew about my “sleepwalking.” They didn’t know I was having nightmares all the time– nobody did. I just couldn’t tell anyone. Scary dreams were things that little kids got worked up over, not someone in high school.

It’d never been this bad, though. Then again, I’d never died either. Weren’t you supposed to die in real life if you died in your dreams? I’d come so close, so maybe that was why…

The clock caught my attention. Four in the morning. My mom was going to be up soon, and the last thing I wanted was for him to see me like this. I picked myself off the ground, bundled the blankets around me, and trudged back to my room so I could pretend to sleep for another four hours until I had to get ready for school.

The nice thing about having attention span issues is you can entertain yourself for hours with your own thoughts. The downside is it’s very easy to have those thoughts interrupted by things like a dog jumping on your bed and otherwise trying to get your attention.

“Go away, Soraya.” I shoved my head under the covers and tried my best to ignore her. So she tried to hide under the covers with me.

It’d never occurred to me before, but her name now struck me as strange. Soraya was an Arabic name, and she was an American Water Spaniel– not true to her heritage. And it always seemed like such a noble name. Noble was something American Water Spaniels aren’t. They’re silly-looking dogs whose main purpose in being was to bring back dead animals to hunters who would be otherwise too lazy or preoccupied to pick up what they shoot in the first place.

She’d always been something of a neurotic dog, which was why she was hiding in the first place. Half the time I didn’t even bother trying to find out what spooked her, but I was always the one who had to calm her down.

I felt her nudging in closer to me, so I reached out to pat her head in kind. “You’ve got it so easy.” It was true– I guess on some level I envied dogs, I had for a while. It was on some emotional or spiritual level I couldn’t quite describe. Dogs made sense in a way people didn’t, and they seemed so carefree.

I didn’t want to be a dog though, much as I liked them. There was something else out there that was better, I realized in a half-asleep epiphany. Something more me. Something like…

There was a loud creak as the bedroom door opened, and whatever answer I had slipped away. Mom was up. And I needed to pretend to be asleep. I closed my eyes and I drifted into periods of brief, fitful minutes of sleep interrupted by jerking awake, and then starting the cycle anew.

* * *

I shouldn’t have to tell you how incredibly miserable I was when I had to wake up. But energy drinks were made for people like me, and after a highly nutritious breakfast of Saltines (I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep any other solids down) and a combination of liquid sugar, fruit juice, and lots and lots of caffeine, I had about enough to make myself go to school without fainting along the way.

To my credit, I’d only ever fainted once, and that was attributed to a terrible diet. I can’t remember the last time I’d stepped into the cafeteria. I usually just skipped lunch. It was too noisy there, too loud, and too much high school politics. I didn’t want to bother with all the cliques. So I just hid out in the library. The librarians liked the company, I liked the books and relative solitude. It was mutually beneficial, so they never told the SROs.

The forty-five minutes I got to spend in there were almost always the best part of the school day. But it was over three hours away. And I had Advanced Algebra first period. I already hated today.

Of course, therein lies the advantage of being hungry and tired most of the time. It’s really easy to zone out when you’re like that.I could just glide through all my classes, not needing to comprehend anything because you’d have to be lobotomized to not at least marginally pass core classes, and I’d be fine with just marginal. If you haven’t inferred as much, I just want out of school.

So I shuffled into class, collapsed in the desk, and hoped the teacher wouldn’t notice me dozing off. They usually don’t. As long as you show up and don’t fail the tests, they’re not to concerned. I like things that way.

I had my head nestled in the comfiest part of my hoodie when I saw someone walk in out of the corner of my eye. A very tall someone with nondescript black clothing who I’d never seen before at school. He was wearing sunglasses, but I could tell he was staring right at me. Usually I don’t care if someone is, but there was something just wrong about that guy. I don’t know how to put it, he just weirded me out– there was something predatory about him. And he didn’t look strong, he was built like a scarecrow, but I got the impression he could rip me apart without trying. So much for my nap.

The teacher ran through the roll. There weren’t any new names on there, and he didn’t even address the creepy guy. Nobody else even seemed to notice him; the kid behind him seemed to just stare right through him.

I looked up the clock. Only five minutes into class. On the bright side, I was starting to feel a bit sick. Maybe I could call home and say I was coming down with something. It wouldn’t even be a lie for once, because the clock was now sliding in and out of focus. And my chest was tightening and my heart felt like it was going to explode I was starting to feel like I would be sick in the middle of class.

I staggered out the door without bothering to give an explanation. I think the teacher was yelling at me to get a hall pass, but I was beyond the point of paying attention. The world wasn’t just blurring now, it was sliding completely out of focus. The colors were all starting to blend together. The only reason I wasn’t running into anything was I’d been through these halls too many times to count.

I rubbed my eyes– it didn’t help. And I wasn’t tearing up or anything like that, so there wasn’t anything in my eyes. I still managed to stumble into the bathroom and turn on the faucet. I splashed water onto my face– it was ice cold and I didn’t really care. If anything, it made me feel a little better.

I took deep breaths in and out. The panic and sickness started to subside. I checked the mirror– I looked pale and gaunt and sickly and…

…And I was seeing things, because my ears had gone all pointy and furry. I stumbled back, blinked…and they were still there. I slumped against a wall, not daring to look at the mirror as if pretending they weren’t there would make them go away. Morbid curiosity drove me to touch the side of my head.

But nothing was there. Nothing weird, anyway. So of course when I looked in the mirror just to make sure, there was something weird behind me. Or someone, rather. He was only there for a second, his eyes seeming to bore right through me beneath his sunglasses. And then he was gone.

It took a few moments to sink in. And then I ran. I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t what was happening, but it was just the only thing it seemed like I could do.

* * *

Next thing I knew I was hiding between some lockers on ground floor practically hyperventilating. “Deep breaths. Deep breaths.” I told myself. “It was just a panic attack, it’s over now. Calm down. Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong nothing’s wrong nothing’s wrong…” I eventually was able to make myself believe it, enough I could shakily stand up.

The intercom crackled to life. “Connor Glendon, please report to the administrative building, Connor Glendon, to the administrative building, please.”

Awesome. My truant ways were catching up to me.

“Doctor Reese is expecting you.” Or not. I guess the little incident earlier could have just been passed off as one big panic attack (and maybe that was what it was in the first place? Though I’d never felt like I was sick during one) and he was just worried about me. That didn’t seem so bad.

I flashed my ID at the SRO standing in front of the administrative building. It was probably unnecessary, I had to go here a lot, but policies are policies. I was halfway down the hall when the SRO yelled “Stop!”

I spun around– but it wasn’t me he was addressing, thankfully. It was two girls I didn’t recognize. One blonde with baggy shirt bearing the name of a band I didn’t recognize and a redhead with a scowl that seemed permanently set on her face.

The blonde girl smiled at the SRO. “I’m sorry. We’re new here, we just haven’t had a chance to get our IDs.” Her eyes flashed for a moment, and they turned bright yellow all over, with tiny, slitted snake-like pupils in the center. “Trust us.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. Actually, that was an understatement. I’m not sure how to describe how seeing that felt otherwise, but I’ll try. It’s like looking at something that can’t exist, but does. Yeah, I know some people will wear weird contacts that look kind of like that just to shock people, but this was different, more natural-looking.

And just a few minutes ago, I’d grown dog ears. Either I was going crazy or…well, I was probably just going crazy. But I was running a fever, maybe that just meant the heat was frying my brain. Which meant I was probably going to die soon. That didn’t seem much better.

The SRO’s eyes glazed over. “Well, alright.” And just like that, he let them by. Now that just wasn’t right. I mean, everything about it, right down to this weird gut feeling that she was scary and dangerous. And the officers here were supposed to be really strict, thanks to the fact we’d gotten school shooting threats and things like that. They strolled on right by me. The blonde one smiled and waved at me before they both disappeared down a corridor.

God, what a day. And I had to think of a way to diplomatically express the fact I might be having hallucinations to Doctor Reese really fast. I slumped into a chair outside his office. I just needed a few minutes–

“Connor!” He was standing right in front of me. I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Sorry.” He did one of those fake-y laughs. “Didn’t mean to scare you. But we’ve been calling you for the past ten minutes, I was getting worried.”

“Sorry…” Was all I could come up with.

“Well, come on in.” He gestured inside. “I’ve got some things I’d like to talk to you about.”

I had a sinking feeling about that. But I went inside anyway, it was better than being in class. Reese was shuffling some papers at his desk, one of those ‘I-know-something-about-you-and-I’m-not-going-to-rest-until-you-tell-me’ smiles about him. “You missed some of you classes today.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yeah.” I stared out the window. Eye contact just felt uncomfortable.

“Have you been feeling well lately?” More paper rustling.

“Well…” Diplomacy or honesty? “I’ve been having nightmares again, so I didn’t sleep much. And I think I had another panic attack in class today.” Mom always said honesty was the best policy, and it’d be a nice change of pace.

A glint of concern flashed through his dark eyes. “You haven’t been having panic attacks often, have you?”

“This was the first one in a while.” Several months, really, I’d had one the first time I tried to take the SAT.

“And the dreams?”

“A lot. Almost every other day.” I tried not to think about the jaws closing around my windpipe. And failed. I reached my hand to my throat. “They’re usually vivid. But sometimes I just wake up afraid of something and don’t know what.” He seemed to take notice of that, his eyes settling on my neck. I jerked my hand back down.

He still got the picture. He was really good at that. “Are there any recurring themes to these?”

“I guess. I’m usually running from something.” This was getting uncomfortably Freudian for me. I took Intro to Psych, I knew where dream analysis went.

“And do you escape, or…?”

“I don’t.” And I wanted to leave it at that.

He went ‘hmmm’ again and leaned back in his seat. “So your anxiety’s been worse than usual?”

Well, thank God, and here I was thinking he’d ask be about what my relationship with my mother was like. “I guess, yeah.”

“It’s entirely possible that’s just a reflection of that.” He steepled his hands. “You see, dreams often resemble our waking experiences and parallel then, though sometimes in abstract ways. If you’d like, you could tell me a bit more about them.”

I sighed. “I don’t know, it’s pretty generic. I’m running through a forest trying to get away from a monster, and I…I don’t get away. Then I wake up. But I’m pretty sure I sleepwalk during them. I don’t wake up in my bed.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Have you gotten this checked out by a doctor?”

“The medicine didn’t help any.” And it made me sleep so deeply my alarm clock didn’t wake me up.

His phone rang. “Sorry, one second…” He checked the screen and went ‘hmmm’ for what must have been the tenth time in the past five minutes. “I have a question for you that might seem strange, so I’d like to apologize in advance if I’m off-base here.”

“Shoot.”

“In addition to these dreams, have you been having any hallucinations?”

My stomach lurched. “How’d he know?”

And of course he noticed that too. “Perhaps that you’re becoming something else. Maybe you’ve even felt like that was true for a while, and it’s only just now these hallucinations have started happening.”

I was still too stunned to say much of anything.

He paused as if waiting for the inevitable confirmation. “It’s alright if you are. It isn’t your fault. But these are symptoms of a rare mental disorder–”

“So what? I’m schizophrenic?” I cut in.

“No, nothing like that.” He held up his hands. “This is much less permanent and much more manageable. It’s called therianthropic psychosis, I’ve worked with it before.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It hasn’t passed DSM review yet. But it’s very real, I’m sure of that. I get the feeling you can attest to that.”

“If I have this, what am I supposed to do–” Someone started slamming at the door. Reese jerked up, looking stunned. Obviously this wasn’t part of his script. Whoever it was– sounded like a she– started yelling, though it was too muffled to make out. “Shouldn’t you, like, call security or something?” There was a shrill edge to my voice I really didn’t like.

He was already reaching for his phone again when the door broke open. Literally. It just splintered.

The red-haired girl standing in the doorway seemed innocuous enough, except for the shards of wood in her hands. I’d seen her a few minutes ago trying a more subtle approach to breaking and entering. “You!” She hissed. She lunged at Reese, yowling like some kind of animal…and she looked like one too, she’d grown ears and a tail. Like I had earlier, except feline instead.

To be continued…

This is a very rare relic, one which grants the blessing of incredible luck to its bearer. Its shape is variable, as it must be something of emotional significance to the user– something related to a symbol of luck or luck-based games are preferred (dice, cards, et cetera.)

The ceremony to bless the item is unusually intricate for a Yarasa-Ke ritual. The members should consist of the person wishing to use it, a Cleric, and optionally a character witness. The ritual begins in a consecrated area (lest any evil spirits overhear the soul’s name of anyone present), with the Cleric inviting Yara to watch over the ceremony, and to listen to the words of xir children. The hopeful bearer then speaks, telling both his/her name and soul’s name, indicating what cause s/he will use the Boon for, and giving testimonies of his previous deeds. The character witness may also intercede at any time during the testimony to give his own (this acts as Aid Another.) It is expected for this to last at least an hour, though stretching things out won’t help– it’s the substance of what’s going on that matters. If Yara is sufficiently impressed by the ceremony, xe will bless the item. Those in attendance will simply know– there is no way to describe the mystical connection involved in words.

Creating a Fortune’s Boon is a DC 35 check, using either the Wisdom, Intelligence, or Charisma modifier based on what sort of appeals the hopeful bearer uses. An Intelligence-based check would focus on logical appeals, a Wisdom-based check on philosophical appeals, and a Charisma-based check for simply being as bombastic as possible. A character witness may Aid Another for a +2 modifier, up to +5 for an especially appropriate item, and a particularly impressive speech or holding particular favor with Yara grants up to +10 on the check. Hopeless situations grant up to +20; Yara is the patron of lost causes.

A successfully created Fortune’s Boon allows the user to re-roll once per day, as the Luck Domain’s extraordinary ability. The Fortune’s Boon will cease to work after the Yarasa-Ke has completed the cause s/he swore to do.

This incense has the handy ability to act as the Calm Emotions spell, all in a travel-sized thurible! (That’s an incense container, for the uninitiated.) It is activated by burning the incense inside. Once activated, it for all intents and purposes acts identically to Calm Emotions, and can be dispelled in the same ways.

Calming Incense must be created from a special mix of plants and herbs grown on hallowed ground– usually a Church of the Goddess. Virtually all churches have gardens and keep a stockpile of dried herbs in order to make incense with, and the larger ones may even have greenhouses in order to keep growing year-round. After mixed, the incense is blessed by a Cleric, and is ready to be used.

A single block of incense set inside a thurible will last for ten minutes. However, blocks can be quickly replaced and lit as a full-round action.

The Eyes of Death is a common and frequently seen relic among Carrion Birds, consisting of a small animal skull worn as a pendant or bracelet. It mimics the ability useable by Alchiban Clerics of Repose, allowing them to see the last living moments of a person after eating the flesh of their corpse.

Upon eating the carrion, the user goes into a trance and experiences exactly what the deceased person did in their last minute of life, through said person’s eyes. The events in their trance pass in real-time, and the effects of the visions often have a somatic effect outside of it. For example, if the deceased was strangled to death, the user will act as if he or she is asphyxiating despite being able to breathe normally, while if experiencing a vision of someone being stabbed to death he or she will clutch at the stab wounds and scream in pain, etc. Needless to say, the trances are often gruesome and traumatic, and Carrion Birds are encouraged to be stoic in order to not be as affected by them.

A person in a trance cannot be broken out of it by conventional means, though Dispel Magic and Break Enchantment will stop the vision. Furthermore, while in a trance, the user cannot take any actions, and must take a round to recover from the horror of the vision.

The creation of The Eyes of Death is simple enough, the maker simply takes a skull from an animal — one which he or she did not kill — and has a Cleric bless the object in a simple ritual ceremony done during at the night, with only the Cleric and the person wishing to use the relic present.

The Veil of Thanos is a strip of dusty-grey cloth made of a sheer fabric, usually appearing to be very aged, threadbare, and tattered. For it to have any effect, it must be worn as a blindfold. Upon doing so, the bearer is able to see those who have been touched by death– the exact thematics vary from user to user, but most often those stricken with disease appear as skeletons, necromancers have a certain distinctive pallor about them, and murderers appear monstrous– the more kills, the worse they seem.

Mechanics-wise, it requires a Knowledge (religion) check to work. DC 5 reveals undead and spirits, and beings who are in the advanced stages of an undeath-related infection such as ghoul fever. DC 10 shows beings in the earlier stages of an infection. DC 15 reveals necromancers (here interpreted as “those who can control undead,” this includes Clerics who use Rebuke Undead.) DC 25 reveals even the slightest taints of death, usually those who have engaged in willful murder.

The creation of a Veil is a lengthy process, as the strip of cloth must first be buried in the earth of a gravesite for a month, then dug up and consecrated by a Cleric on the spot. These Veils are highly important to traveling Carrion Birds in their battles against the forces of Evil death cults, and thus are considered sacred items to be treated with great care.

Weasels have a nomadic lifestyle and tribal social structure, with a number of unique customs influenced by the worship of Yara, their Chaotic Good deity. Domino’s tribe was recently overrun by the Lions.

Weasel Names

Weasels are deeply superstitious regarding names. They believe that names hold immense power, and by knowing a person’s name you can invoke fell magic to curse them. More specifically, agents of a dark god they formerly worshipped and will now refer to only as That One will hunt down the person whose true name is known and do unspeakably awful things to them. As such, they are usually given a public name, something mundane and often based on their appearance or personality traits, and later choose a “spiritual name” for themselves, which for all intents and purposes is their true name. This spiritual name is only given to those the Weasel has absolute trust in.

Given their beliefs, Weasels also do not consider it important to introduce themselves by giving their public name, especially if they’re travelers. Instead, they introduce themselves by giving a goal. Only after they feel they can trust someone will they tell their public name, and it will be many years before they feel safe giving their soul’s name.

Public names include Rindle, Pine Needles, Harlequin, Dust, and Scree. Secret names are difficult to discover, since most of them are in the archaic and hard-to-learn Weasel language and few Weasels will willingly give theirs away to someone who’d readily speak it.

Weasel Stats

• -2 Strength, +2 Dexterity
• Medium-size humanoid; base speed 30 ft.
• +2 on Balance and Climb checks. Weasels use their Dexterity modifier instead of their Strength modifier for Climb checks.
• Bonus feat: Weapon Finesse.
• Low-Light Vision (Ex): Weasels can see twice as far as humans can in conditions of poor illumination.
• Untrustworthy: Weasels’ body language tends to give people the sense that they’re hiding something, or not being entirely forthright. NPCs’ reactions to weasels are typically one step lower on the scale used for the Diplomacy skill.
• Weapon Familiarity: Weasels treat Sheng Biao as martial rather than exotic weapons.
• Automatic Languages: Common or Lion, Weasel.
• Favored Class: Rogue.

It was quite a nice day for a festival, especially a moment as auspicious as Unification Day. The street vendors had already set up, music was blaring from every which way, and the Federation of Light soldiers had already made their first appearances, intermingling among the human police.

The police were just figureheads by this point, Francisco was sure of that much. It presented a darkly amusing contrast, seeing their primitive shotguns and kevlar next to the full-body, face-covering armor of the aliens.

He wished they would just go away. There seemed to be a feeling of mutual discomfort between him and the aliens. Most of the normal people would stare in awe at the Federation soldiers, even if just for a few seconds, as if it were an instinctual reaction. Something about them drew the gaze of every human around them.

Except for him, it seemed. He’d tried to fake that reaction, of course. But there was just something missing, a level of respect or fear he simply didn’t have. And they noticed, he was sure of it. He could feel their stares beneath their helmets as he passed by.

And that was all the more reason to go straight home. A break from his classes was much welcomed, and he didn’t want to waste a moment of it.

He passed through a street filled with performance artists. Wincing at the cacophony of noise, he picked up his pace, weaving through the crowd of dancers, singers, musicians, and observers.

He was nearly in the clear when something caught the corner of his eye. Maybe it was because he hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night, maybe it was just a trick of the light. But he was sure he saw some sort of bird-human thing, sitting upon a blanket and playing a guitar.

He did a double-take. His eyes must have been fooling him, because there was just a normal person sitting there. The musician, noting the sudden attention, glanced up expectantly at him, his eyes briefly flicking down to a hat set out in front of him. It was empty, barring a few coins.

Francisco fished out a few bills and dropped them in his hat. And when he looked up again, he was staring at a pitch-black bird. “Thanks, man.” Somehow Francisco got the impression he was grinning at him, despite the fact he had a beak.

He blinked. And there was a human once again. “Y-yeah. No problem.”

The tips of claws plucked away at guitar strings, the strings somehow keeping intact. “Enjoying the festival?”

He smiled nervously. “Not really.” He heard the familiar soft clinking of Federation-issued armor. “I mean, not that I don’t like it, I was just heading home.”

The guitarist shrugged. “You don’t have to sound guilty. I’m just here to play. Gotta eat somehow.” A passerby tossed a coin into his hat without even a sidelong glance. “Doing pretty well so far. I’ve already got enough for dinner tonight.”

Francisco stared at his tail, which was fading in and out of view. “That’s good.”

“Anyway,” the musician waved his hand at him, “don’t let me keep you. I’ll be taking a break soon.”

“Yeah.” He felt a strange sense of familiarity looking at him, the same he got from meeting a distant relative he hadn’t seen in years.

The musician arched an eyebrow. “You alright?”

Francisco broke his gaze as a dull pain struck at the back of his head. “I’m fine. Just a headache. I, uh…” He tried to concoct a way of asking ‘do you ever look half-human, half-animal?’ without sounding as if he had lost his mind. He failed. “Um, bye.”

He rushed away before the crow-man could give any kind of farewell, wanting to take the incident out of his mind altogether.

* * *

He was nearly home when he heard the crackle of a voice synthesizer coming to life. He slowly turned around to face a trio of Federation soldiers, mere feet away from him.

“This area is off limits.” The one in the center said in a robotic voice.

The street ahead was oddly empty, come to think of it. Only a few soldiers walking around, but no humans. And they looked even more armed than usual.

The soldiers exchanged glances with each other. “Leave now. This area is off-limits.” It repeated.

“You could take them.” A tiny and probably insane voice in the back of his head said. But the dull whir of their energy weapons charging up quickly disabused him of that notion. “But my apartment is that way.”

He felt a strange presence in his mind, one which evoked the same kind of feeling he got whenever somebody was staring over his shoulder at his computer monitor while he was in the middle of an IM conversation. And then, without any warning, it was simply gone.

Even if their faces weren’t visible, he could tell the aliens were becoming agitated. One of them started tapping frantically at a device on its wrist.

He started feeling a very strong compulsion to run away, for he was certain nothing good could come of this. And before he could make himself consider what an incredibly bad idea running was, he did. He was not an especially athletic person, and a broken nose that had never quite healed properly made it difficult for him to breathe, but he was beyond caring about that for he was sure that it would be far worse on him to stay. And he didn’t dare look behind them, but he could hear their synthesized voices commanding him to stop. And perhaps it was the work of an overactive imagination, but he thought he heard them firing off a warning shot. That just made him run faster despite the burning in his lungs, and to take more turns through the streets in a desperate attempt to lose them, hoping all the way he wouldn’t end up trapping himself in some dead-end alleyway.

* * *

He ran blindly until he couldn’t see them anymore, or hear their demands for him to stop. When he finally did come to a halt, it was just outside a plaza, filled with market stalls and people milling about.

“Perfect.” He breathed a sigh of relief and tried to catch his breath. “Maybe hiding in plain sight will work.” His stomach growled. “And it’s not like I’ll be able to go home anytime soon…” Then the reality of his situation sunk in. “I can’t go home. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home again. The Federation probably thinks I did some kind of horrible crime and if they catch me they’ll probably lock me away forever in a spaceship or something and I’ll never be able to escape and it’s not like I could prove them wrong even if I wanted to because I can’t afford a lawyer and my life is over.” He would have sunk to his knees if it wouldn’t have been so conspicuous.

“Calm down.” The insane side of him said. “Your life obviously isn’t over if you’re still standing here. But it will be if you don’t get something to eat.” And the smell of food was very tantalizing.

He went for the very first stall he saw without much of a line. “Wait. I can’t let anyone get a good look at my face.” He pulled the hood of his jacket further over his head, grabbed a candy bar, half-threw a few bills at the cashier, told him to keep the change, and found a tree to sit under.

* * *

The midday sun had been painfully bright, and so the shade was a welcome break. The candy bar was even more welcome, and probably had enough sugar to keep him going for another two hours. And with his blood sugar up, he was feeling better– though that wasn’t saying much.

He reclined back against the tree, looked up towards the sky, and daydreamed about flying away. He’d never liked mundane life as far back as he could remember, not that he’d let anyone know. But the nagging feeling that there was so much more to it than trudging through a school and going through the motions of social activity with people he had nearly nothing in common with was always there, and it had been getting worse lately. And it was accompanied by half-remembered dreams of somewhere far away, so painfully beautiful it made him want to cry, but these dreams eluded his grasp despite his best efforts to recall them in detail.

He knew what his family would say, that he needed to get his head out of the clouds and face reality. But it couldn’t hurt to dream just a little, could it? If he couldn’t get joy out of living in the real world, finding it in a dream world was better than nothing. And though he’d always dreamed of adventure and being a hero, this mess wasn’t quite the adventure he’d been hoping for.

His thoughts were interrupted, as that same peculiar feeling of being invaded he’d had earlier that day struck him again. He jerked his head up, and started walking if only because it seemed like the sensible thing to do. He couldn’t afford to stay still for too long, after all– the more he moved around, the less likely he was to be found.

“Citizen Francisco Gonzales.”

His blood froze in his veins, but he forced himself to keep going. He tilted his head just enough to see a squad of Federation soldiers, and found himself walking faster. It was a common enough name, after all. All he had to do was blend in, and everything would be alright. They’d never even know.

“Citizen, you are ordered to come with us.”

But now the crowd he was in wasn’t moving anymore. They were completely frozen in place, like human statues. And he had little choice but to freeze with them.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see them circling around their human flock. He felt the gaze of one of the soldiers on him. Unable to take the pressure, he ran, trying and failing not to shove the people in his way. The people he did push simply fell over like ragdolls.

He thought he was making good time until pain lanced through his shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, and try as he might to force himself to move, he couldn’t.

The aliens seemed incredibly tall up close, and even more intimidating. One of them effortlessly picked him up, and he got a very good view of the group of humans. Their blank stares were fixed on him.

His heart hammered in his chest. “Why won’t they do something? Why won’t anyone help me?“ He drew in a ragged breath, wanting nothing more than to make something move under his own power. “Why can’t I do anything?”

In that moment of desperation, he felt something growing inside of him, like a tiny spark becoming a flame.

Or maybe even a dragon spreading its wings.

Whatever it was, it caused him to surge back against his captor, kicking it away. And whatever part of him that was not reeling from shock realized that, somehow, he was flying now, and furthermore for the first time since he was a child, he was able to breathe clearly. That part of him then had to go from that to figuring out that it wasn’t in his best interests to question his fortune and that flying away would be a capital idea. Therefore, it took him a couple seconds and at least one energy blast before he finally tried.

The fourth realization was that flying was difficult, especially when you were being shot at. The energy blasts might not have been paralyzing anymore, but they still stung, even though he was covered in some kind of blue, chitinous plating. He flailed around in mid-air, panicked even more when he lost altitude, and dropped like a rock.

On the bright side, he at least landed on a soldier. Even if it wasn’t the most graceful of landings, it did break his fall and he had the comfort of taking one of his pursuers with him. But through the stars dancing in his eyes, he saw the others advancing on him. He stumbled to his feet, and backed up. His tail thudded straight into a wall, and if he hadn’t had more pressing concerns he’d have wondered when he’d gotten a tail. The soldiers were closing in on him, and the one he’d fallen on was now getting up. He got the impression from the way they moved they weren’t afraid of him in the slightest. Amused, perhaps, but certainly not afraid.

His eyes darted about, searching for an escape, but they had formed a half-circle around him. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” That left fighting back as his only option, and he had nothing to use against them.

The tallest soldier in the group leveled his gun at Francisco. He bared his fangs, for what little good it would do him. But he’d made up his mind to go down fighting. He lunged at the alien, his claws scraping uselessly against the armor. The squad immediately opened fire on him, but he dove to the ground, taking the soldier with him, and the energy bolts skimmed over him. He grappled with the soldier, knocking its gun out of its hands. He felt the tiniest surge of hope until something stabbed into him. The very tip of a blade was poking through his arm, dark blue smoke seeping out of the wound instead of blood.

He reflexively jerked back, though he wasn’t in that much pain. Somehow, he’d figured getting stabbed would hurt a lot more than that. He couldn’t help but stare at the hole clean through his arm with the same morbid fascination one might experience from looking at a car crash. And while he was distracted, the alien, now with a blade protruding from its wrist, kicked him in the chest, knocking the breath out of him. He staggered back, and clenched his fists.

It felt as if he was holding something. He stole a quick glance at his hand, and saw a sword, the same blue color as his armor-like skin. “Come on,” he urged himself, “use it!” He pointed the sword at the nearest alien’s throat. “B-back off!” Now the soldiers seemed more hesitant. Encouraged, he continued on. “Or I’ll…”

They opened fire on him. He dove to the ground in a desperate attempt to avoid the first volley, and it mostly worked. A few shots clipped through his shoulder, but he could still count himself among the living for now. There was a low whining sound as the guns recharged. With that tiny interval of opportunity, he scrambled to his feet, gashed through one of the aliens with the sword– peculiarly, it left no sign of injury, even though he was sure it’d gone right through the armor– and trampled over it as it fell to the street.

He jumped up, trying to fly again, only to find he couldn’t. And for the umpteenth time that day, he ran for his life, smoke trailing behind him. He could hear thunderous noises behind him. As his mind was clouded with terror, it took him a moment to work out what they were. Gunshots, the kind that used bullets and not energy bolts. And since when had anyone used those? Weren’t they illegal or something?

On top of that, he could hear shouting now. And howling, and roars. “That can’t be the aliens.” He could hear shuffling footsteps, though they were headed in the opposite direction of him. Something whooshed past him– he could have sworn it had spots. Or that could just be the dots swimming around in his field of vision. He’d been hit pretty hard, after all.

“Can’t stop now.” He was so close to the outskirts of the city, and didn’t hear any armor clinking behind him, maybe they’d finally decided to leave him alone. Meanwhile, there were other things rushing past him now– things that walked like humans, but had tails, fur and claws. And they were carrying guns.

The few humans left in the part of the city he was in were breaking out of the trance that the Federation aliens usually put them in. In fact, they were downright panicked, and an outright riot of animal-people, humans, and aliens was forming. One of the aliens took aim at the crowd mobbing him, but the instant it was about to fire, a tawny-furred feline creature bludgeoned it over the head with her gun. The soldier staggered back, and the cat-person tackled him, tearing at his armor with her claws in search for a weak point.

Most of the crowd scattered, revealing another scuffle going on– a much more one-sided one. Another soldier had a human by the throat in one hand, and a blade in the other.

Francisco didn’t dare hesitate– there wasn’t enough time for that. He charged at the soldier, shouting “Hey!” as loudly as he could. The alien had just enough time to see who was attacking it before his sword cut through its helmeted head. The soldier crumpled to the ground. Peculiarly, it still was breathing after what should have been a fatal blow, though he was still too giddy with his own successes to think too much on the properties of his new weapon.

“What did you just do?” The human he saved asked, a shrill edge to his voice.

It took a few moments for Francisco to recognize who he’d just saved– the guitarist. “I remember you!” He threw open his arms for a hug, but the guitarist jerked back.

Francisco blinked and tilted his head. It wasn’t quite the heroic welcome he’d been hoping for. But a cursory glance at his outstretched arms explained why.

“Sorry.” He sheepishly withdrew his sword-bearing hand. “I forgot I had this.” He unclenched his hand, but the sword remained levitating just above his palm. “Um.” He shook his hand around, but the sword refused to budge. “Aaaah, how do I make it go away?” He flailed around wildly while the guitarist gave him a look of utter disbelief. He ceased moving. “Don’t you remem– oh.” He tapped his rock-solid skin with his free hand. “Um, I know I don’t look like it, but you know me. Sort of. I mean, we met earlier today. I was just different then. I gave you some change…”

Francisco thought he saw a brief flash of familiarity in the man’s eyes, but then it was gone. “No.” The guitarist said under his breath. “No way.”

“Look, I know this seems crazy, but it’s true!”

“Crazy, that’s it. I’m going crazy.”

“No, that’s not it either, it’s just…” Francisco trailed off. On second thought, insanity did seem like a likely explanation for all this, especially since he didn’t have another one. But insanity didn’t explain his wounds. “Well, I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?” His volume rose with each syllable until he was shouting at the very end. “Doesn’t anyone have a clue about what’s going on here?”

“I know as much as you do!” Francisco grabbed his hand and dragged him along behind him. “But the Federation is after us! Now let’s go!”

Though he wanted to get both of them as far away as he could from the Federation soldiers, his injuries were finally starting to catch up with him, adrenaline was draining from his body, and he was getting incredibly tired. His steps grew gradually slower and slower, then he couldn’t move at all despite his best efforts to the contrary, and the world around him grew dark.

The next sensation Francisco was aware of was pain, and the next thought he had was “OWOWOWOW oh hey I’m alive?” He opened his eyes– he was well away from the city, in a small forest of some kind. And his sword was finally gone.

“Welcome back to the world of the living.” It was the guitarist’s voice. “Not that I’m sure I want to be right now.”

He turned his head to face his companion with what he hoped looked like a smile. The bird’s image seemed to be stable now, instead of flickering from human to crow. “You…”

“Yes, me.” He said. “And I have a name, you know. Though I guess we weren’t ever properly introduced. I’m Gabriel.”

“Francisco.” He paused. “Have you noticed that…well…”

“This?” Gabriel pointed to his beak. “Yeah, it’s kind of hard to miss. You were out when it happened. But you’re not looking quite right yourself.”

Francisco stared at his claw-tipped feet. “How bad is it?”

“Just…” Gabriel pulled a compact mirror out of his pocket.. “See for yourself.”

For a moment, he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. But it had to be him, the thing in the mirror was making all the same movements he did. He looked reptilian now, with deep blue scales that covered his body in plates like the shell of a beetle, though it was pockmarked with holes where he’d been shot. And the longer he looked at his new self, the less unusual it seemed, like this had been what he was all along and he just hadn’t known up until now. He flexed his muscles and grinned. There was something oddly handsome about his new self too, in an otherworldly sort of way.

“You’re not taking this seriously!” The guitarist hissed. “I mean…what are you? What am I?”

“I’m not really sure.” He dropped his arms to his side. “And I don’t really think it matters. Whatever we are, we can help people now.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re about to say we can overthrow the Federation.” He sighed.

Francisco deflated a bit. “Well, maybe we can find other people to help us? I mean, it can’t be just us. I saw others back in the city, I’m sure of it!”

“I did too, but there weren’t that many of them.” He ran his hand through his feathers. “And the Federation outnumbers humankind, and if they outnumber humans they probably outnumber…whatever we are.”

“But we’re able to resist them.” He protested. “There are no coincidences. We must be like this for a reason, and we can’t let what we have go to waste.”

“That doesn’t mean we should go charging off blindly, though.”

“Exactly!” Francisco nodded. For a moment, Gabriel looked relieved. And then Francisco continued. “We need to find the people who were fighting them back in the city.”

“The crazy ones doing all the howling and screaming and waving guns around?”

“They were probably just trying to look scary. I don’t think they’re bad people.”

“How can you even tell?”

“I saw one of them saving a group of people from the Federation,” he said quietly. “She attacked a soldier when they were about to get shot.”

He fell quiet for a few moments. “You’re probably right. This is…” Gabriel sighed again. “I just can’t believe everything that’s happened. Weird doesn’t even cover it.”

“Maybe they know what’s going on. Look,” he pointed back to the city, which now had a few spaceships hovering over it, “it’s not like we can go back now. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

He was silent for a painfully long time. And then… “Fine. I just want answers, though.”

“Great!” Francisco sat straight up, and immediately regretted it. “Owww…”

“You’ve still got holes in you, you know.” He deadpanned in the way that only someone who’d seen considerably stranger things in a very short period of time could say. “We should be staying the night, at least.”

Francisco shook his head. “We shouldn’t. What if the Federation finds us?”

“Okay, point taken. But you’re still hurt.”

He examined his skin– there was no longer blue smoke coming out of him. “I’m not bleeding.” He ventured. “I think. And I can still move.”

“But we don’t even know how to find these other…people, or whatever they are!”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem.” Francisco said cheerfully. “They stand out.”

“Fine.” He threw up his hands. “If you’re crazy enough to do this, let’s go. But if you faint again, we’re stopping.”

“I’ll be fine!” He hopped off the tree root he’d been resting against. “Let’s go! There’s not a moment to lose!”

This had been more of the adventure Francisco had been hoping for– even if the odds were impossible, he had a purpose now, and at last he was no longer alone.

To be continued…

Stephanie glared menacingly at the blue screen, though despite her best efforts it refused to retreat and go back to the online encyclopedia she’d been looking at mere seconds before. Rolling her eyes at the all-too-familiar problem, she jammed the restart button just a bit harder than necessary. The blue screen faded to black, then to a colorful splash page with a load bar crawling its way towards completion. And then blue again.

Knowing fully well it was futile, she looked inside the computer case and was met with a confusing mass of crystals and wires and goodness-knew-what else. Her eye twitched. “Come on…” Restart. Black. Blue. Curse. Kick desk. Fist-to-keyboard contact.

“What did you break this time?” Her brother, Alex, was poking his head in through the door she thought she’d locked, a smirk playing across his face.

“I didn’t break it.” Her voice was defensive in spite of herself. “It’s just…” She struggled to come up with a technical-sounding term, before deciding simply on “…blue-screening.”

“Right.” Alex hovered over her shoulder. She forced back the urge to punch him in the jaw. “Should be easy enough to fix.”

There was a long pause, punctuated by Stephanie drumming her fingers against the edge of the desk. “Well…?” She finally asked. “Are you going to do anything?”

“What’s in it for me?” He fired back. “Reagents are expensive, you know. I can’t be using them on just anything.”

Stephanie knew quite well this was a blatant lie, considering that he’d run off with her other brother and a group of their friends to test out spells that involved explosions, ones which she heard from half a mile away. She also knew quite well it was not going to do her much good to argue with him and it certainly wouldn’t do her computer any good to make him angry. “I’ll clean up the living room for this week.”

“Deal.” Given the size of her room, it took him about three steps to get out the door and out of sight.

A few moments later and he returned, dragging his backpack behind him and holding a stick of charcoal in his hand. “Move.”

She obliged, sitting on the bed and inadvertently waking up Bonnie, who opened her one good eye and yawned, before relocating to Stephanie’s lap. Stephanie smiled down fondly at the kitten and stroked her fur. Bonnie purred loudly enough to nearly drown out her brother’s incantations.

There was a sound much like someone slamming an eraser against a chalkboard, followed by shrill electronic beeping. The beeps decreased in volume and pitch, then simply stopped altogether.

“And that should be it.” He dusted the charcoal off his hands. “Have fun.” And he disappeared out the door again, leaving an unsightly ring of black dust on the carpet.

“Great. Thanks.” She muttered, half-sincerely. She carefully ushered Bonnie off her lap and with a spare shirt attempted to clean the charcoal off the ground without success. She sighed. Too late to get the vacuum now with her mother in bed, it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

The computer was indeed working now, at least. So she re-opened her browser, and went back to reading about mages and thinking about how wonderful it’d be if she were normal.

Sure, she knew what other anaetherian activists would say. She’d lurked on the message boards, even posted once or twice, and written about anaetherian rights in the privacy of her own blog which nobody ever read. “People without the Gift are just as capable as mages, because lacking the Gift does nothing to hurt our mental capacities. It’s society that restricts us. We don’t need a cure, mages need to stop gearing everything towards magic-users blah blah inclusiveness blah…”

It was true on some level, she was very aware it was right. Still, it seemed so much easier to just change one person than change all of society. So, just maybe…

She skimmed through the “Anaetherian rights controversy” page, listing false cure after false cure, fraud after fraud. Or maybe not. A false hope was better than none, but there didn’t seem to be much insight.

“Oh well.” She closed the tab. “No use dwelling on what can’t be.” So she spent the rest of the night skimming through pictures of baby animals, reading news feeds, and talking to people hundreds of miles away she’d probably never meet. Time slipped past her, and once she finally decided to check her clock, it was five in the morning.

She sighed. Though she wasn’t tired, Mom would be up any time now, and the last thing she wanted was to get caught up this late again. She issued a few quick goodbyes to the few people still up, and half-fell into her bed, with Bonnie curling up beside her.

* * *

The mechanical droning of an alarm clock woke her up, and the sunlight streaming in through her window conspired to ensure she stayed awake. Despite the fog enshrouding her mind, she had just enough in her to slam the snooze button and take a bleary glance at the clock. Two o’clock. She groaned and slammed her head on the pillow.

“At least Alex is in school now.” She reluctantly kicked the blankets off. “Nobody can yell at me for sleeping in so late anymore.” She made it into the kitchen before realizing something odd. She hadn’t kicked off a kitten along with her covers. She was put at ease for a moment when she considered that Bonnie obviously had gotten up before her.

But there was something else wrong. All the while telling herself she was being too paranoid for her own good, she took a look back at her room.

Bonnie’s food bowl was empty, except for a few crumbs she was sure were left over from last night. And Stephanie was sure Bonnie would have woken her up well before two. A hungry cat was a nigh-unstoppable force, as she’d found out.

“Bonnie?” No response, not even the clicking of claws across the hardwood floors of the hall. She poured a bit of cat food into the bowl, rattling it as loudly as possible. Still nothing.

With deepening dread, she stepped out onto the porch, “Bonnie?”

She heard a high-pitched and familiar mewing, and her paranoia dissipated. She knelt over, and her kitten ran straight into her arms. “Don’t do that again, alright?” She sighed. “You scared me.”

She then found another reason entirely to be afraid when she turned around– a very tall man dressed in the robes of a high mage. She jumped backwards, almost dropping Bonnie.

“Don’t be afraid.” Stephanie figured his tone was supposed to be soothing, but it wasn’t doing much to banish her contemplations on where her mother had left the guns. “I’m here to help you.”

She was certain she’d seen a scene just like this in a movie, right before the female lead was kidnapped and almost murdered. So she took a few careful steps backwards towards the house, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Who are you?”

“We’ve met before.”

She reached for the handle of the door.

“You’re a member of several Anaetherian Rights forums. So am I.”

Her mind spun, trying to remember what kind of information she’d disclosed that would help him find out where she lived.

His eyes flicked to her hand on the door. “I’m only here to help. I promise.”

“Why should I trust you? You…” She tried to come up with a creative way to tell him off, like her brothers always could. Nothing worth saying came to mind.

“You don’t trust me.” He paused, looking thoughtfully to the sky. “What if I told you that you wouldn’t be the first person I cure?”

A million questions buzzed in her mind. If he really had a miracle cure, why wasn’t he telling anyone? Why wasn’t it all over the news by this point in time? How could he have succeeded where scientists had failed? Who was he in the first place? Unfortunately, she couldn’t manage to come up with anything more articulate than “Prove it.”

“As you wish.” He bowed his head slightly and flickered out of view.

The closet, that’s where the guns were! She rushed inside, almost tripping over the rug. It was right about when she threw open the door she remembered the gun rack was locked. And not without reason, they’d been expensive, not to mention hard to find in the first place. After weeks of scouring mainstream stores, her mother had finally given up and had them special-ordered.

Her mother had also been exceptionally paranoid and reinforced the locks on the rack with magic, reasoning it was the only way to deter potential thieves. In retrospect, it was ironic– the one equalizer she had she couldn’t even use without other mages around.

There was a strangely polite rap at the door. She cautiously peered out from behind the door. It was the mage, a familiar woman beside him.

“Rose?” Her jaw dropped. How long had it been– several months? All the things she’d been warned about, how a mage could easily create an illusion of someone she knew or trusted, and she’d have no way of knowing, dropped out of her mind. She stepped outside to meet her.

Rose smiled shyly at her, the same smile she remembered from pictures and webcam conversations. “Sorry if I worried you.”

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, she’d been at the back of Stephanie’s mind ever since she disappeared from the boards. “What happened?”

“I was cured.” She held out her hand. It contained a tiny flame of raw aether. “It’s real, see? I can use magic now.”

Stephanie’s eyes widened. Her hand shaking slightly, she reached out to touch the flame. It wavered and flickered as she drew nearer.

Rose snuffed out the flame before Stephanie could. “I’m…” Her voice sounded shaky. “I’m really sorry I left without telling anyone. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, you know how most of them are. They wouldn’t believe me, or if they did they’d say I was a terrible person for wanting to be cured. They didn’t understand what it was like to be that bad.”

“I know.” She sniffled and forced back tears.

“Things have changed now, though.” She brushed at her eyes. “His cure really works. I can already use elementary-level magic. This could turn my life around. It’s already changed so much.” Her voice cracked. She took a deep breath. “And it could change everything for you too.”

“It’s alright if you can’t decide now.” The mage stepped in. “I will give you time to decide.”

“Okay.” Was all she managed to get out through the growing fog in her mind. This was all too much.

“I will be back tomorrow.”

“W-wait.” She protested, her hand subconsciously reaching out for the mage. “Could you–” Could she stay? That would require some extremely awkward explanations. After all, she’d kept her online life secret from her mother, and her mother had never taken kindly to the possibility she could be talking to forty-year-old men pretending to be teenage girls or weirdos who write poems about killing themselves, or everyone at their school or both, the only people she seemed to think existed on the Internet.

“What is it?” Rose asked.

Stephanie heard the sputter of the school bus’s engine drawing close. “It’s nothing.”

And then the two of them disappeared from sight.

She trudged back inside, collapsing on her bed just in time for her brothers to go barging in the hall, arguing about something-or-another. She’d long since learned to shut them out, and paying attention to their arguments wasn’t going to help her figure all this out. She just needed to calm down and clear her mind.

Easier said than done. The conversation she had kept going through her mind over and over again, and all she could think of was what she should have said, what she should have asked, what she should have done.

She grabbed her laptop and brought it out of sleep mode. Maybe a little distraction would help. And as soon as she logged in an IM window popped up, from someone named Maranatha. ‘Hey there. How’re things going?’ It took her a moment to recognize the username– it was one of the members of the Anaetherian Rights message board.

‘Hey. ^_^’ She rested her chin in her hand. Now there was something that was going to be difficult to give a straight answer to. ‘I could be better. Lots of things going on.’ There. Honest, yet not direct.

The reply was almost instantaneous. ‘Aww. :/ What’s going on?’

She tapped her hands on the trackpad, trying to figure out how to dodge the question. ‘It’s a long story.’ Cliché, but effective.

‘Ah, alright…’ The person typed back.

There was a long pause, and no indicator Maranatha was typing a message. She bit her lip. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least bring up Rose. But she still had to close her eyes while typing the message. ‘Do you remember anyone named Damask from the forums?’

Maranatha took a few moments to respond. ‘I think so, yeah. She hasn’t posted in a while though.’ Another pause. ‘Did something happen to her?’

“Yeah, something happened to her, alright.” She muttered. ‘She’s doing fine. I just met her today. She just needed to take a break from the forums, I guess.’

‘Yeah. I can’t really blame her. After that whole flame war over the cure issue.’

Stephanie winced. She remembered one (or several) flame wars erupting on the site, but only had the vaguest understanding of them– she’d always made it a point to stay out of the controversial topics. They’d always gotten extremely heated, and it usually took no more than a few posts before someone got called an idiot (or some more colorful iteration thereof.) ‘I know she was pro-cure…’

‘Well, her and a bunch of overzealous parents. Versus a bunch of overzealous people with a lot of pent-up anger. Nobody came out looking good.’

‘And then she just stopped posting…’ No wonder she’d seemed so worked up about accepting a cure.

‘Yep. :/ That topic was the last I saw of her. Is she thinking about coming back…?’

‘No.’ And with good reason, she thought. ‘She’s had some other things come up.’

There was an awkward break in messages. ‘Are you anti-cure?’ The question came out before Stephanie even had time to think about how stupid it was to ask something so controversial. That was always the advantage of a forum. You had time to think about what you were saying, and you could always just take it back by deleting your post. Then again, if you did put it out there and couldn’t do anything in time, everyone saw it.

Maranatha didn’t reply for a while, which left Stephanie to pace around her room, trying to figure out how she could defuse what would most likely be an explosive argument. And then her computer pinged. ‘In a sense, yes. I think saying that we need to be cured is saying we’re inferior people. And we aren’t. I’ve always agreed that we’re only disadvantaged because of how almost everything in society is so dependent on magic. Yet things don’t have to be like that.’

Once Stephanie could have believed that. Now she wasn’t so sure. ‘But if there was a cure, no strings attached, and you could choose to have it…would that be better?’

‘I don’t believe in no strings attached.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘If there was. Just hypothetically.’

‘Then all anaetherians would be pressured into getting it. We’d lose the insight we get from having to go through life without magic. Think of all the anaetherian inventions and scientific discoveries and progress we’ve made, gone. And those who they can’t pressure into taking their cure would be even more marginalized.’

‘It’s easier than having to change the world.’

‘But is it really better?’ Maranatha replied without missing a beat.

Stephanie could feel a headache coming on and she wasn’t sure if it was from stress or the fact she’d barely eaten or had anything to drink the entire day. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Just think about it, alright? Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.’

‘Yeah.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘And I’ll BRB. Time for dinner.’ She left without checking to see if Maranatha bid her farewell.

Dinner, however, turned more into a thirty-minute hunt for decent food and ingredients, followed by another thirty minutes of trying to cook it, followed by another bout of picking at it, then trying to hide from her mom arguing with her brothers, then playing with Bonnie to calm down, followed by a massive video game binge into the early hours of the morning. She finally crashed at three in the morning into a deep sleep.

* * *

The doorbell dragged her into consciousness. Her clock indicated it was twelve, but she felt like she’d barely slept at all. She trudged to the door. Her heart skipped a beat when she opened the door to find what she thought was a complete stranger until she realized it was the mage. Rose was nowhere in sight.

“Have you decided?” He asked.

“Yes.” Her voice was shaking, and she couldn’t manage to spit out her answer.

He arched his eyebrow. “And it is?”

“I…” She prayed she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say. “I want to be cured.”

“As you wish.” He nodded. “Please follow me.”

She didn’t quite understand why they had to use the woods behind her house for this. The mage had rambled on about leylines and some other things she vaguely remembered from her brother’s textbooks. Then he traced out a circle around her and started sprinkling powders, scrawling runes in the earth and muttering incantations. All-in-all it was nearly an hour before he finally said things were ready (and considering it was starting to glow faintly, it was fairly obvious things were.)

He told her he had to leave now, but all she had to do was just sit in the circle until it was done. Easy enough. It was so quiet and peaceful out here, dead silent except for the wind and the faint sound of bird wings flapping overhead. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes, and couldn’t resist letting her mind drift away.

* * *

Something jabbed Stephanie in her knee. She lifted her head up, her eyes snapping open, and immediately regretted doing so. It was painfully bright, despite it being sundown. Everything was like there had been a dimmer on the sun that had been on low, and now someone had turned it all the way up. Furthermore, it seemed like everything she could make out without going half-blind had a green-blue ambient glow around it. The circle she was sitting in was especially bright.

She covered her watering-up eyes with her hand and felt something strange. Something soft and downy, something that definitely wasn’t human skin. With a sense of growing dread, she let her hand travel to the center of her face. She had what felt like a delicately curved beak. Her blood ran completely cold. “Where is the mage?”

She tried to stand up, but stumbled, nearly falling forward onto the ground. There was a weight on her back, something that felt like it was jutting out of the very bone of her shoulder blades. She reached her hand behind her back and tugged at it. It moved, and she could feel muscles and tendons stretching as if it were another limb, along with a covering of the same downy substance on her face. Feathers.

“I have wings.” She realized with a sense of awe and horror and shock all mixed together. “And I’m some kind of mutant bird-thing.”

The next few moments were a whirl of disjointed and panicked thoughts. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. “Okay. Okay, it’s going to be alright. Transmogrification is a normal magic discipline, it’s reversible. I’ll just have to get the mage somehow.” She tried to speak, but her words came out as harsh screeching.

She clamped her hands (talons?) over her beak, and took a few deep breaths. And then she tried again. The screeching was quieter this time, but still nothing remotely human.

She hobbled around, trying to pace to help herself calm down and think straight, but movement was far harder than it should have been. So she settled for her mounting frustration by kicking around some leaves. And then within the circle the mage had created, she unearthed what was most likely the source of her problem– a single owl feather. She’d heard of minor contaminants and mistakes causing catastrophic results. Just her luck.

With an irritated sigh, she collapsed on the ground. “What am I going to do now? And what am I going to tell everyone?” There was always the off chance it was just a temporary issue. Or maybe she was a shapeshifter, like they always talked about in fairy tales. Owl-creature by night, human by day.

“Or it’s just punishment for wanting something I never should have wanted.” She thought bitterly. That seemed to be the way things always went, after all. Or maybe Maranatha was right– there’s no such thing as no strings attached. And now she had to deal with them– it was just a matter of how.

She began pacing anew, her steps slowly becoming more and more natural, though she still had to hunch over. Still, it was proving hard to think through her headache, and therein one course of action revealed itself. Go back home and get some asprin.

“And try not to get attacked by my family. They’d probably think I’m some mad mage’s latest transmogrification experiment.” And the irony of it was that it was half-true. She collapsed underneath the biggest, shadiest tree she could find. Best to wait until nightfall. Maybe then they’d just think she was a very malnourished bear and not a monster.

She tried to start speaking again in an attempt to pass the time, but even something as simple as going through the alphabet was hard. Vowels proved to be much easier to enunciate than consonants. “At least speaking Japanese won’t be a problem.” Then she remembered how long it’d been since she picked up the books and DVDs she’d gotten to help her learn it in the first place, and cringed.

The sun was getting lower and lower now, and her surroundings got a deeper and deeper tint of red to them. It had to have been a beautiful sunset, and she couldn’t even look at it. The upside was that it was almost dark enough she didn’t need to shield her eyes anymore. The leylines were still bright, but at least they were nowhere near as bad. And the world was coming more and more into focus. If anything, now she could see even better than she used to.

“Guess I should get started now.” She hoisted herself off the ground and began the walk back, taking in the sights of the forest as she went. Everything was as clear as, well, day, and despite it having been months since she’d gone for a walk in the forest. Of course, the fact her house lights were still on helped.

She winced at the flourescent lighting, and tried to take a look inside. She couldn’t see anyone in the main rooms, which meant her brothers were probably playing video games, and her mom was in bed, a stroke of minor luck after several major misfortunes. And she was finally getting to the point where she could form actual words, something that made her happier than it should have considering her situation.

She couldn’t resist taking a quick look in the window glass to assess the damage done to her. A bipedal barn owl stared back at her with wide, pitch-dark eyes, its tawny feathers stirring slightly in the wind. She traced a talon around its…no, her heart-shaped face, trying to force her mind to register that the creature in the glass was her. And when that proved to be a depressing prospect, she tried to force herself to remember it didn’t have to be permanent.

She broke eye contact with her reflection. “The sooner I get this over with, the better.” Steeling her nerves, she carefully opened the window and attempted to slip inside. Though she might have been able to do this as a human, she failed to take into account she now had wings. The result was an audible thump much like the kind one would hear if a bird flew into a windowpane.

She didn’t even bother to check and see if anyone was coming. She ran the best she could, ducked behind a tree, and huddled there until she stopped feeling like she was about to die of cardiac arrest. When she recovered, she opted instead to go through the back door, and the sudden change in light made her flinch.

Inside, she could hear the faint sound of the TV in the basement. She breathed a sigh of relief– they probably had their game up too loud to hear much of anything. She poured herself a glass of water and after a struggle with the bottlecap, finally managed to fish out a pair of asprin. She then raised the glass to her mouth, and tapped the edge against her beak, splashing a bit of water on the ground.

“Aaaawh, come on…” She muttered. She glanced at the basement door. The game’s sound effects were still audible even with it closed, but that did nothing to quell her uneasiness. “Don’t have time for this.” She took the asprin dry, tried to ignore the horrible aftertaste, headed back for the door, and almost tripped over her kitten.

She stopped dead in her tracks, and almost fell over on her face. Bonnie was staring at her with wide eyes. The kitten fluffed out her fur and hissed, backing away from Stephanie. Stephanie felt her heart sink, and fresh tears came to her eyes. She stepped over Bonnie, and opened the door. Then she felt a cold nose poking at her heels, followed by purring. Bonnie rubbed up against her leg and mewed– her usual call for attention.

“Good girl.” She stroked Bonnie’s fur as gently as she could. A lump was rising in her throat, and she was reasonably sure it wasn’t because of the asprin. “I gotta go now, okay? I’ll see you again soon.” She sincerely hoped she wasn’t lying, and slipped out the door before Bonnie could react.

“At least someone recognizes me.” She thought dourly. She tried (and failed) to formulate any other upsides to her current situation when a glint of light caught her eyes. There was a ladder leaning against their shed, and thus an idea formed in her mind…

* * *

She carefully ascended the ladder onto the roof and looked below her. It looked a lot higher up than she thought it would have, and she felt her hands shake a bit at the thought of having to jump.

It was about this point in time she remembered that owls were hollow-boned, and that a fall would not bode well for her skeletal structure. She sighed and sat down, her feet dangling over the side of the roof.

She looked up again at the sky. She could see bats darting erratically about chasing after moths, and even another owl.

More than anything, she wanted to join them. To be free, and get away from the dismal situation she was in.

So she sat for a few more minutes, staring enviously at the owl and the smoothness of his (for she was almost certain it was a male, though she wasn’t able to place a reason why other than simple intuition) flight. So she closed her eyes, let her instincts take over, and jumped.

And after a few seconds in, after she was certain she hadn’t broken anything or otherwise hurt herself, she opened her eyes. She could see the world below with so much more clarity than she had as a human, right down to the crickets leaping from grass blade to grass blade and mice scurrying about. Part of her thought that the mice would make a nice midnight snack, but it was drowned out by sheer exhilaration.

Half-delirious with joy, she pumped her wings faster. The world below grew smaller, her house farther away, the crisscrossing leylines began to blend together, and the blasted, lonely, middle-of-nowhere town that’d felt like a prison for as long as she’d been there started to fade, and even if just for a moment, everything she’d been through was worth it. Even her bizarre new body.

* * *

She flew until she felt as if her wings were about to fall off, and made a somewhat rough attempt at a landing. After plucking some twigs from beneath her feathers, she trudged back to her house, daydreams of a nice warm shower dancing in her mind.

And she was preoccupied enough with those daydreams she didn’t notice a few irregularities inside. Firstly, the lights were still on even in the middle of the night, when her early bird mom and not-quite-as-night-owlish-no-pun-intended brothers would have been long since asleep. Secondly, there were some aether leylines planted in the ground that hadn’t been there before– not that she would have noticed, given she’d never looked at her house with the Sight before.

Not being entirely disconnected from reality, she realized the two unfamiliar shadows skulking about did not bode well. With her heart rising into her throat, she slowly, carefully, and as stealthily as she could crept up to the window.

The lights inside were far too bright for her tastes, but she could make out who was inside. The mage and Rose. Her feathers fluffed out in irritation. “So now he decides to show up.”

Instincts were telling her there was something very wrong with this situation, and reason was quickly filling in the blanks as to why. She knew for a fact that her mother wasn’t a light sleeper, that the doors were supposed to be magically locked at night, and the mage’s body language was far too casual for someone who’d just broken into another person’s house.

And most importantly of all… “What’s he done to them?” He couldn’t have just waltzed in there without anyone noticing. Horrible ideas of what he could have done to ensure nobody saw his entrance ran through her head.

“You can come in, you know.” She stifled a screech of shock– how could the mage have heard her? “I know you’re out there.”

“He’s bluffing. I hope.” Not to mention being in a room with just him was the last thing she wanted right now.

He sighed. “Please be reasonable. I just needed to see you.”

“Reasonable!” She said in a low hiss.

“Yes, reasonable.” She saw him nodding from her vantage point near the window. “And before you say anything, yes, I can hear you too. Please, come inside. I don’t feel like talking this loudly.”

“Tell me what you’ve done to my family first. Or…” She trailed off. What could she threaten him with?

“Oh, them. Don’t worry, they’re fast asleep. Very fast asleep as a matter of fact.”

The thought of punching him entered her mind before she remembered how much frailer her bone structure was now. “What’s that supposed to mean? What have you done with them?”

“It was just a simple sleeping draught, now will you calm down? You’re being very unreasonable.”

“You drugged them? Why? Why are you even here?”

“I just needed to get your attention, seeing as you’ve been avoiding me. And I’m sure you don’t want your family to see you in the state you’re in. Now will you please come inside? It’ll be a lot easier on both of us.”

“Stephanie, please.” She could just barely make out Rose’s voice. “We just want to solve this problem, and we can’t do it while you’re out there.”

“Fine.” She’d hoped what she was saying sounded defiant. The self-conscious side of her told her she just sounded petulant. And to ease a little bit of her frustration, she gave the door a jab with her clawed foot to make it look like she was kicking it open.

“Thank you.” Despite her new appearance, he was staring at her impassively.

Rose, on the other hand, was not. She let out a tiny gasp of shock and jumped back slightly. “What happened to you?”

“Something must have contaminated the spell circle.” The mage answered for Stephanie. “This could be difficult to fix.”

“Really.” Stephanie tried to make her displeasure as readily apparent as possible.

“Really.” He intoned back. “It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you’d just turned yourself into this after you’d become a mage, but now being a whatever-you-are and a mage are…intertwined, so to speak.” He paused thoughtfully. “Incidentally, did the rest of the spell work?”

If Stephanie had lips, she would have been scowling at him. “You’re worried about that?”

“Well, did it?”

She threw up her hands. “Yes, it did! I can see leylines, I tried to tap into one, but that’s the least of my problems now!”

The mage was stroking his chin, oblivious to her distress. “Well, that much is good. Shame illusionism is such a complex matter, otherwise I could at least make you look human.”

“So you’re saying there’s no way I can be human again.” She wondered how long it would take her to get to the phone and call the police. Probably too long. But maybe if she could just get him to keep rambling on…

“Oh, there certainly is.” He nodded. “Actually, I’d rather prefer that solution, it will be easier on everyone.”

There was a pause, most likely engineered by the mage for dramatic tension. For the most part, it was just wearing down on Stephanie’s already frayed nerves. “And it is?”

“Reverse transmogrification. Basically, I could try to turn you back.”

She tapped her claws on the dining room table. “This sounds too good to be true.”

The mage clenched his jaw ever-so-slightly. “It can be a slow and painful process. For whatever reason, your transformation was unusually fast, but now I’ll have to work much more deliberately to make sure I don’t take away your new gifts, or anything else.”

“Have you ever done this before?” The tapping was quickly turning into a drumbeat from her favorite metal ballad.

“It’s an experimental procedure.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you won’t mess up again?” She tried to glare at him, but couldn’t quite manage to meet him in the eye.

“It wasn’t my fault!” And that was the loudest she’d ever heard the mage get. “It was just an unforseen error. Trust me, nothing like that will happen again.”

“Trust you!” She snapped. “This is the second– no, third– time you’ve randomly shown up at my house! And this time you’ve broken in! And you drugged my family! And you’re acting like this isn’t even an issue! What is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” He turned away from her. “I can see you’re not going to listen to me. Shame some people just don’t know what’s good for them.” He took a small cloth from somewhere within the folds of his robe.

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”

He upturned a small vial, dabbing the cloth with a pungent, clear liquid. “Oh…and don’t bother trying to run.” He returned the vial to his robes and with his free hand snapped his fingers. Stephanie felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her. “I’ve just activated an anti-magic forcefield. As long as its up, you’ll be unable to use any kind of magic or leave here.” He continued. “Last chance. Will you undergo the procedure or will I have to force you to do so?”

“Stephanie, please.” Rose said softly. “I didn’t get my powers the first time around, just do what he says. He’ll be able to fix this.”

“No.” Her voice might have been shaking, but she was sure in her convictions. “This was a mistake. All this was a mistake. I never should have…” She stopped herself before her voice started to crack too much. “If anyone’s going to fix this, it’ll be me.”

“I see.” He advanced towards her, an impassive look on his face. “If you insist.”

She flattened herself out on the counter, her talons splaying across the cold surface, the very tips of her claws scraping against a frying pan. And without taking any time to even consider the potential consequences, she grabbed the frying pan and slammed it into the mage’s head as hard as she could.

The impact jarred even her, but needless to say the mage had it much worse. He crumpled bonelessly to the ground without a sound.

* * *

Stephanie bundled her covers around her, trying to lull herself into sleeping. Being questioned by the police had been exhausting, yet unnervingly enough she couldn’t get it out of her head long enough to rest. Then again, ever since she’d changed she’d been quite literally sleeping all day. It hadn’t taken much to get to that point given her previous sleep schedule, but that didn’t stop her mother from griping about it.

Still, if that was what she chose to gripe about, Stephanie was fine with that. It was already something she was quite used to hearing, and she’d take any semblance of normalcy she could. She was sure her family was horrified by her change, seeing as how they were avoiding her even more than usual, but at least they weren’t talking about it, and more importantly they weren’t asking her questions about what had happened. They just avoided her. So had Rose, for that matter– she’d only heard from her once in the past few days. She seemed to be coping, but barely. She’d overheard in the police station that there was some residue of magical tampering with her mind and memories, and it’d take a while to recover from it.

At least Bonnie was taking things well– she had a near-infinite supply of feathers to play with now. And things were easier that way, being left to her own devices with the one being in the world she knew could care less about her appearance. Still, she couldn’t say the past few days had been easy at all. The police station had been particularly bad. At least her mother had teleported them straight to the station, but Stephanie still had to insist on wearing a very heavy raincoat, the baggiest pair of sweatpants she could find, a hooded sweatshirt underneath that, and a wide-brimmed hat to hide as much of herself as she could. It was hot as blazes, but it worked.

Then once they were done interviewing her, they had to do a physical exam of her. The horrified look on the nurse’s face the moment she took off her coat and hat was burned into her mind and would be for a very long time, though the actual exam was a blur. And the second it was over, she hid in the bathroom and cried. Her mother took her straight home afterwards, but the damage had already been done. She was certain her mother at least felt bad for what happened, because once she woke up from a fitful sleep, she found a cheeseburger from her favorite restaurant with her name literally on the styrofoam box in the fridge.

If she didn’t find something to do, she’d just get more depressed. As of lately, escapism had been proving to do her a lot of good. There were even times, however brief, that she could forget about what had happened, usually when she let herself get lost in a story.

That was something she fully intended to do right now. It wasn’t hard to find her computer, all she had to do was follow the glowing leylines. As she was skimming past the numerous sites on transmogrification reversals on her bookmark list, someone IM’d her. “Who’d be on at this hour?” She squinted at the font on the screen– Maranatha was, apparently, greeting her with the usual ‘Hey there! ’

‘Hey.’ She might as well be civil, even if she didn’t especially feel like talking now. Besides, it’d give her a chance to practice typing with claws again.

‘How are things going?’

She sighed. Not this again. ‘Kind of rough. Not sure if I want to talk about it.’

‘Ahh, alright. Well, I remembered the talk we had about the cure, and I was just wondering if you’d seen this…’ A link to a topic on the Anaetherian Rights forum followed. Out of morbid curiosity, she clicked on it. Her blood ran cold in her veins when she recognized the title– it was a headline from their local newspaper. Someone had posted an article about the mage’s arrest.

‘They haven’t said much about the reason why,’ Maranatha continued, ‘they just cited reckless endangerment and unsanctioned magical experiments. But the rumor is he was trying to find a cure.’

She stared blankly at the screen. How could word have spread so quickly? And more importantly, how could they have found out?

‘Anyway, it was in your area…I was just wondering if you’d heard more about it.’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ She replied, and subsequentially realized she was probably just leading on Maranatha.

And surely enough, his response came back within mere seconds. ‘Try me.’

It might be nice to talk to someone who wasn’t a police officer about everything that had happened. If she’d had more sleep, she might’ve had the sense to decide against doing that. But she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours and her mind was frazzled from stress. ‘Yeah, he was doing experiments. They had side effects, that’s probably why they’re not giving out details.’

‘That’s not so unbelievable. I mean, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think those kind of experiments happen more often than we like to think. The side effects must have been pretty severe, though.’

‘Oh, they were.’ She sighed and looked at her hands. Now she was almost getting used to seeing them there.

‘Do you know if the people he experimented on are alright…? :/’

‘Yeah, we’re alright.’ Something registered about that sentence as being wrong, but it took her a few moments (after she pressed Enter, unfortunately) to work out what. “We’re.” Just the wrong pronoun to use, even if it was true. She felt her skin heat up beneath her feathers. Maybe she could just claim it was a typo?

‘Wait, we?’ And Maranatha noticed. Just her luck.

She took in a shaky breath, and after a great deal of struggling for the proper words, came up with ‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’

There was a break in messages. She was almost to the best part of the chapter when the message alert started flashing. ‘Can I tell you something?’

She scratched the side of her head. “Okay…?” ‘Yeah, I guess.’

There was another long pause without so much as an alert that a message was being typed. And then, finally, ‘It might be easier to show you.’

She received a webcam invite. Her curiosity piqued, she accepted it.

Her breath caught in her throat. Looking at the webcam, a weak smile on his face, was a huge, humanoid bobcat. “H-hey.” His voice was barely audible, and on top of that it was scratchy and sounded barely-human. It almost reminded her of hearing a parrot talk.

Fortunately, the webcam conversation wasn’t two-way or he would have caught her gaping at him.

“Um, I know this must seem really weird to you. I can explain…I think.” He cleared his throat. It inexplicably brought to mind Bonnie when she was trying to cough up a hairball. “I guess you can tell I had some, uh, side effects too.”

Her hands quavered as she typed. ‘Did someone do that to you?’

“You could say that.” His tufted ears twitched. “So,” he laughed, or tried to do something that sounded like it, “how’s this for side effects?”

“It can’t be.” Then again, it probably could. Who knew how many other people the mage had gone after? She desperately wanted to ask how and who and why, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to do so.

“I’ve gotten used to it, though.” He went on, his voice growing more confident. “And there are other people like me out there. It’s a bigger community than people think. And there’s a lot of support for people who live with magic-related disorders other than anaetherianism.” He cast his gaze askance. “I guess I just wanted you to know you’re not alone.”

She brushed tears away from her eyes, self-consciously straightened out a few stray feathers, and sent a webcam invite of her own before she was able to process what she’d done enough to regret it.

She knew the moment he accepted, because his jaw dropped open. “I…did…” He took a deep breath. And then another, just for good measure. “Did you ask for someone to do that to you?”

She stared blankly at him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know.” There was a desperate look about him. He gestured furtively to his tail and ears. “Right?”

She shook her head.

He sighed. “I guess it really was an accident for you.”

Stephanie found herself gaining a new hatred for people with an aversion to straightforwardness. “What are you talking about?”

“Shapeshifters. Or anthros– I mean, anthropomorphic animals. Some people like…um, like me, we turn ourselves into them with transmogrification. Or try to.”

Stephanie had a vague recollection about seeing a news segment on them. For the most part, it had played up how insane they had to be to undergo the difficult rituals needed to become one, and other alleged deviant aspects of their lifestyles. The report had seemed thrown-together and sensationalistic, like most news reports. “You wanted to be that?”

“No! I mean, I wanted to be like this sometimes. I was just going for shapeshifter, but something went wrong and I couldn’t change back. So,” he pointed to his muzzle, flexing out the claw on his index finger, “I’m stuck as an anthro. And I didn’t want to be. I mean, I really didn’t want to be. You’d be amazed at how hard it is to get used to not being human. Everything’s made for human mages.”

“Tell me about it.” There was a smile in her eyes– faint and bitter, but there.

“Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. I don’t get to talk to other anthros much.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You probably think I’m a hypocrite. All that talk about resisting a cure and being yourself, and look at what I did to myself.”

She shrugged. “No. You’ve just got more personal experience than most anti-cure advocates do.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” He returned the smile. “Um, if you’re interested, there are some forums and places I could show to you.” His voice grew quieter and quieter as he went on, making the last few words difficult to make out. “Everyone’s really nice, and they won’t care you didn’t change on purpose. And they can help you deal with it. They really helped me out.”

The bitterness in her smile started to fade away. “I’d like that.”

His ears perked up. “Really? Um, hang on a second, let me send you the links.”

She sorted through them, the other part of her mind on the outside. Dawn was breaking outside, and she could feel exhaustion creeping in, the edge at last taken off her anxiety. After everything that had changed, the sky hadn’t fallen, and the world was still there. She could fly again any time she wanted.

For the first time she could remember, she finally felt free.

When I came to, there was something very different.

I don’t just mean in the sense that I was now covered in fur, or had a tail that felt strangely in-place and “right,” just like the rest of the new me did. Everything was sharper and stronger and harder to ignore. And it all smelled. Not in the sense of smelling bad, but everything smelled like something, and you have no idea how weird that is until you actually experience it. It’s like the olfactory equivalent of holding your face against a wall covered from top to bottom in neon signs. It was giving me a headache, though I’m sure the fact I’d been bludgeoned in the head by a thing about twice my size and three times my weight wasn’t helping.

And that was about when I realized the thing was probably still around, and there were probably a lot of other things with it. And now I was a thing. I wasn’t sure what kind of thing, but I wasn’t human anymore. Strange. I wasn’t thinking differently. I guess I was an animal all along. And now it was too late to cure me. I almost hoped the skinchangers would kill me, but they must have done something to change me. And with my luck, that probably meant I was too valuable to kill.

One of the skinchangers (I knew it was one because it smelled like a…well, like a me, but bigger and more dangerous, with a faint coppery tint I knew was blood) kicked me in the back. I froze, making myself as still as possible. If they thought I wasn’t moving, they might think I was dead, and then they’d leave me alone.

Yes, I do realize how stupid this sounds in retrospect. In case you’re wondering, it didn’t work. The skinchanger grabbed me by the back of my neck, which would have hurt more if I wasn’t possessed of what had to be an incredibly thick hide. It still managed to force me to my feet, more or less. I was having some trouble standing.

Then it burst into howls of laughter (no, they were literally howls. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense.) If I wasn’t covered in fur, I’m sure my skin would have been glowing red. I growled involuntarily and turned around, only to find a wolf about a foot taller than me.

Actually, everything was taller than me. The forest was lit only by dim campfires, but I could clearly make out one thing– there were no humans left. I might have felt threatened before, but it didn’t even compare to the growing feeling of dread I had now. The fear was back, and I couldn’t blame it. But there was something different this time, and I couldn’t place what because I wasn’t in much shape to think at the time.

I should note people like me often develop a very keen sense of when they’re being watched. Everyone there was staring at me. Most of them had claws and all of them had extremely sharp teeth. And they were tall. Most people have no idea what tall really is until everyone around them is suddenly three to four feet taller than them, or what it’s like to stare up into a predator’s eyes. So, one last time: everything was really tall.

I didn’t have too much time to dwell on this. One of the things lunged at me from the crowd, shoving me against a tree. He only had me by the shoulder. The logical side of me said it was almost playful in a very warped way, the way a schoolkid might punch a friend in the shoulder. The logical side of me had been shoved into a distant corner of my mind. The fact the monster pinning me was the lion didn’t help.

It was grinning at me. When you have a mouth full of very sharp teeth, this is a threatening gesture. I was frozen in place. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I was surrounded by monsters and the extent of my wilderness experience was camping out in a holographic simulation. Once.

“What is it?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the wolf’s muzzle move, and somehow managing to form relatively comprehensible words. I will admit it hadn’t quite occured to me that skinchangers could speak in their real forms. They never did in the movies.

“It looks like prey.” The lion’s grin widened, punctuating his statement with a throaty, growling laugh.

Something snapped inside me, something built up from year after year of being taunted, laughed at, and treated as sub-human. I then figured out what I’d been feeling before, somewhere entangled underneath all that fear, something I hadn’t acknowledged or wanted to notice for ages. Rage. Not just simple anger, rage, the kind that’s tinged with fear for your own life and blights out all rational thought and all you can think about is ripping into something, anything, even yourself if need be.

I’d lost my temper like this a few times, mostly at school. I had been in a few fights, which ended in me being suspended. I had started out thinking the “vacation” from school might be nice. I spent most of the time being tested for mental illness and being yelled at by my parents and being afraid of what I was apparently capable of.

Much like my previous fights, I didn’t remember much from my attempts to break away. I remembered biting the lion’s arm and tasting blood and raw meat, and idly thinking he’d taste better with some aging, and then wondering where the heck that came from. And then he let me go and I was free and I ran and ran and bit and clawed everyone who tried to get in my way and ran some more until I couldn’t hear their yelling and screaming and rioting, and then a bit more just for good measure because I could still smell blood and I wasn’t sure if it was just what had gotten on my claws and muzzle or if whoever I’d attacked was still going after me.

I finally worked up the courage to look behind me. There was nobody there. Therefore, I calmed down just enough for the reality of my situation to sink in, and cause me to panic again.

I was in the middle of nowhere. I’d been turned into a monster, and I didn’t even know what kind of monster I was. Nobody knew I was gone, so nobody was going to come and save me. Even if they could, who’d want to help me now? I had no food, and with how much I knew about survivalism, I’d probably kill myself if I tried to gather my own food. The skinchangers were probably going to come after me soon and I probably hadn’t done a very good job of covering my tracks. I wanted to be tired but I couldn’t because I was still terrified and angry, and I’d probably be killed in my sleep by skinchangers or soldiers or evil spirits anyway. And now I’d never be able to go back to a town or a city because my fur was matted with blood, my clothes barely fit, and I was sure I generally looked like I’d just killed a person or two, and even if I could clean up I’d still look like the stuff of nightmares. And as a more immediate problem, I was really hungry and thirsty.

Well, starvation was not high on my list of “ways I wouldn’t mind going out.” I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to eat (all of the movies and books indicated the flesh of young children, though I now had a feeling that was sensationalized) but just about anything would taste good now.

The problem was still getting it. I was trudging along aimlessly without any clue where I was supposed to head. They told us in school that there were settlements out here (I believe the word “backwater” was used to describe them) but they neglected to mention where. The cities were better places to live, and there was almost never any reason to leave them. And in anticipation of not ever having refugees (except those who come by train from other cities) and attacks from skinchangers and evil spirits who serve them, they built up impenetrable walls around them.

Oh yeah, I was in trouble. I never should have left the skinchangers, the worst they could have done was eat me. There were supposed to be smaller, un-fortified settlements, but the people there were all savages and they’d probably chase me off with torches and pitchforks. Or burn me at the stake, everyone told me they were religious nutcases. Not that I could blame them for trying to kill me or run me off.  A lot of people and things were trying to do that lately.

My self-loathing thoughts were driven away by the sound of running water. Sure, I was sheltered, but I knew a stream when I heard one. I was so parched, and dying of thirst was not high on my list of “ways to go out” either. So I made my way down to the stream, but stopped dead when I saw my reflection at the mouth of the stream.

It took me a moment to realize what I was supposed to be. I hadn’t looked at a biology textbook in a few years, so at first I thought I was some kind of rat, just because of the way my face looked and my tail. But it just didn’t quite match up, until I remembered a few pictures I’d seen. I was probably a possum. They used to be considered vermin and carriers for disease. I had to laugh, because it was the kind of thing you had to either laugh or cry at. But I still managed to do both. It was fitting, after all. Now I just looked like what I really was on the inside– useless, bottom-feeding trash, better off dead so I couldn’t hurt anyone.

Despite nobody being around, the fact I was crying made me embarrassed, and that just made me cry harder. I splashed some water on my face to try and calm myself down and make it not so obvious I was crying, just in case anyone showed up who really cared. Still, it was surprisingly soothing and cooled my burning skin. I’d probably been sweating bullets underneath there. I was beginning to realize fur retained heat way too well.

I took off my shoes (wearing them with paws had been really uncomfortable anyway) and waded into the water. It was cold but soothing. Brought back memories of trips to the park and playing in the creek, times of blissful ignorance. What I wouldn’t give to go back…even a few hours ago seemed better than this. I blinked back more tears and tried to wash the blood out of my fur and clothes. I already was starting to feel like I weighed an extra five or ten pounds just from having wet fur. It reminded me of trying to wash my hair when it was long. Except this was worse because there was more of it.

I took a few handfuls– well, pawfuls of water and drank, trying to not think about what kind of diseases must be in the water. It at least took the taste of blood out of my mouth. And it had another benefit, I could smell considerably better now, because everything didn’t have a coppery tang to it.

Now I could smell something on the distance. Grease. Frying food. Probably some kind of meat, it was too faint for me to tell exactly what. Cooked food almost certainly meant civilization of some kind. Human civilization. I guess skinchangers could cook food, but they were more likely to be the kind of things who’d eat their food while it was still living.

This must have made me an exception. Every other skinchanger I’d seen had been some huge predator animal. I wasn’t. I didn’t know why, I’d never even seen a non-predator skinchanger on the news or anything. Then again, they probably just showed the scary ones.

I almost wondered what that guy on the train (what was his name? Leander?) had become. He hadn’t seemed dangerous. Then again, most people with eidolic toxicosis didn’t, unless their animal took over. The skinchangers had hurt us before they turned us, but I wasn’t sure if they’d bothered to do any damage after the fact. I’d probably done more to them then they did to me.

My stomach growled and I felt the first twinges of hunger pangs. I craned my head up towards the night sky. Surely enough, I could see the glow of artificial lighting. There had to be a human settlement up ahead. I could just go up and…

…And probably be chased off by a pitchfork-wielding mob. I needed to be a human again. That’s how things always were in the movies, the skinchangers could just blend seamlessly into a crowd. Then they’d usually rip into someone and run off, but I was really hoping not to do that. They wouldn’t give me food if I did.

They probably wouldn’t give me food as-is either. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to change back, or if it was even possible. I was stuck like this, and I hated it, and there was nothing I could do, but I was still starving and I needed to eat something. It was late at night. Maybe I could just sneak in. And then break into someone’s house to raid their fridge. or whatever it was outlanders used to store their food. And then have them call whatever passed for a military force there and get shot, or stabbed, or burned at the stake.

Okay, that wasn’t such a great idea. That left eating from the trash. Just thinking about that made me cringe. But I trudged on to the city and the scent of food, hoping I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d find someone with narcolepsy and terrible home security to take from. Maybe I could pretend to be someone’s extremely large dog. Maybe something passably edible would fall out of the sky.

Maybe they even tolerated skinchangers. Like that would ever happen.

The forest was less thick now, and I could see the beginnings of the town. It was more modern than I expected, like a picture from the days before they started using fusion reactors to power cities. They had to use electrical generators. Nobody in their right mind would have a fusion reactor that wasn’t well-fortified. From what I could see at the top of my hill, it was dotted with little houses, nothing big enough to be a military barrack. No stakes, gallows, guillotines, or anything like that either. So far, so good.

I sniffed the air. It still smelled like fried meat, though it had become staler now. And I was getting a whiff of something that smelled even better, though I couldn’t place what. It was some kind of fruit, I could tell that much, but it smelled like it was rich and sweet. My mouth started watering. I carefully followed the trail of the scent, trying to stay away from open areas. I didn’t see any people moving around, but now was a bad time to be careless.

I tracked it down to a garden in the back of someone’s house. Well, it was better than a trash can. Still, it looked barren, except for a few bushes poking out of the ground that were bearing a few strawberries. I shoved them into my muzzle as fast as I could pick them. It took me a few seconds to realize they were oddly squishy, and then a few more to realize that even in the dim light, their coloration seemed a little off. And that was about when I realized I was eating over-ripe strawberries. And they tasted good. My stomach lurched, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw up what little I’d eaten.

Then I smelled something else on the air. Something dangerous, something that reminded me of the skinchanger’s camp. I spun around, only to see a human.

“What are you doing here?” She demanded.

I hissed at her.

And then in the blink of an eye, she was three feet taller than me and was staring down at me with a very canine face.